Skip to content

EU Commissioners jump on the wrong bandwagon, again

View comments

May 15, 2009 |

The BBC reports that two EU Commissioners, Viviane Reding and Meglena Kuneva, are trying to make software (including games) subject to the EU Sales and Guarantees Directive. Which means that they games companies would have to offer “a minimum 2-year guarantee on tangible movable consumer goods".

So since all games are bugged, anyone could take any game back within the first two years.

Tiga has weighed in pointing out the monumental foolishness of this approach.

But the point to me seems that this is a pointless battle. Software as a tangible boxed product is on the way out. The future is digital distribution. It’s subscription businesses. It’s fewer boxed product titles and more downloadable content and add-ons.

So the EU will legislate to solve a problem just as the market is about to take care of it anyway. And if they do, they will just hasten the demise of physical retailers and the boxed product market, all in the name of protecting consumers.

A foolish and pointless EU initiative? Surely such a thing have never been known.

 

(via VG247)

Related posts

Categorised in: Opinion

Tagged in: , , ,

  • http://www.tomjubert.com Tom Jubert

    Do you think this is, hypothetically, a good movement? Clearly the intelligence of the implementation is key (and unlikely to astound), but if done well, couldn’t this be a positive move?

    Clearly most bugs in games are understandable and far from a problem, but there are certainly products past and present released in insultingly bad states, whose publishers could do with a good slapping for rushing them out the door.

    On the flip side, I wouldn’t want to live in a world where inventive yet broken games were no longer releasable.

    [Reply]

Games Brief - name

Games Brief - description

nicholas@gamesbrief.com - admin_email

http://www.gamesbrief.com - url

http://www.gamesbrief.com - wpurl

http://www.gamesbrief.com/wp-content/themes/kitsonian - stylesheet_directory

http://www.gamesbrief.com/wp-content/themes/kitsonian/style.css - stylesheet_url

http://www.gamesbrief.com/wp-content/themes/kitsonian - template_directory

http://www.gamesbrief.com/wp-content/themes/kitsonian - template_url

http://www.gamesbrief.com/feed/atom/ - atom_url

http://www.gamesbrief.com/feed/ - rss2_url

http://www.gamesbrief.com/feed/rss/ - rss_url

http://www.gamesbrief.com/xmlrpc.php - pingback_url

http://www.gamesbrief.com/feed/rdf/ - rdf_url

http://www.gamesbrief.com/comments/feed/atom/ - comments_atom_url

http://gamesbrief.disqus.com/latest.rss - comments_rss2_url

UTF-8 - charset

text/html - html_type

en-US - language

ltr - text_direction

3.3.1 - version